T opped off gas tank. Check.

Loaded up on water and ice. Check, check.

Batteries, flashlights, candles. Check, check, check.

Storm shutters, boards, clean up yard. Working on it.

Oh, remember nonperishable food and gas for the barbie.

Mojitos, anyone?

Gustav, Hanna, Ike, Josephine -- pick your hurricane poison.

We're still recovering from the last big one, three years ago. And it wasn't anything like the devastation of Andrew in 1992.

I still pass a few blue tarps on roofs in Kendall, where I live, from Wilma damage three years ago.

So pray in whatever language suits you. Cachita, for you a red candle! Except water trumps the Goddess of Fire.

And wind? It'll rip out those windows on the older condos throughout South Florida, just like Wilma did. So much for toughened building codes after Andrew.

EXCUSED

Most of those grandfathered condos didn't have to replace their shattered windows with impact-resistant glass. Miami-Dade and Broward officials came up with a compromise because they insisted there were just too many condos left waiting for the tougher and more expensive glass. The city of Miami alone had an estimated 20,000 broken windows.

Rules?

They're different here, as the 1986 Florida tourism ad gushed.

Absent real rules, lacking building codes with teeth, we're left exposed. Again.

Because Ike seems to be heading this way -- if not to Miami-Dade and Broward, then to the Keys. If not there, well, the projection cone on Saturday covered Cuba into the Gulf Coast.

There's no duck and cover here. No going for the hills, except maybe in parts of Lake County north of Orlando, and those exurbs and farmlands don't have the shelters and hotel rooms South Florida would need to house millions. Besides, that's Tornado Country.

This peninsula was never meant to become the nation's fourth most-populated state. It has flying megaroaches and blood-sucking skeeters and coconuts that in a little wind can knock you dead.

Juan Ponce de Leon was looking for a spring to make him youthful when he came to Florida, maybe a little gold, too. We morphed that illusory Fountain of Youth into surgically enhanced babes from South Beach to Palm Beach.

WE BUILT TOO MUCH

Forget Ike. That's just a natural symptom of the greater unnatural disease -- uber-development in all the wrong places. Maybe Ike will hit Key West by Tuesday, maybe veer to the Gulf. Maybe not.

Nothing will save us from the real storm of destruction -- too much construction. We're fighting a culture war about some ill-perceived God-given right to build on swampland and erect condo canyons up and down the coast, all protected in a storm on the backs of hard-working taxpayers.

Blame Willis Haviland Carrier, the inventor of the first large-scale air conditioner used in 1902. Henry Flagler's railroad and Carrier's cold air -- complicated by after-shocks created by an assortment of hotheaded despots from Cuba, Haiti and Latin America, along with those sweet snowbirds fleeing state income taxes -- got us here.

Sure, we love it (or we love to complain about the traffic, the bad attitudes and the rising taxes and insurance costs). Plus the combustible mix of traffic and guns. (Not that I'm against guns -- only the fools who misuse them.)

Evacuation plan in a flood?

Mount Trashmore awaits the huddled masses. If we survive the wind, that 150-foot trash pile in South Dade may be our salvation.

Tent. Check.

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